Amy Ernst and Gregg Simpson, Contemporary Surrealists

Biography

            Amy Ernst grew-up in Connecticut in a family of artists. She graduated from Emerson College, Boston in l979
            with a Bachelor's Degree in Opera/Theater-Set Design and continued her studies for a Post Graduate Master's
            in Arts Administration with a Minor in Painting/Printmaking from Indiana University, Bloomington. Since then,
            she has taken Post-Graduate classes through The Pratt-in-Venice Program, has studied with master print-makers
            Clare Romano, John Ross; Robert Blackburn, Dan Weldon; and with artist John Baldessari at the Santa Fe Art
            Institute, New Mexico.

AMY ERNST: Landscaped Imagery
By Larry List, September 2005

          With a background in theatre design, Amy Ernst draws back the curtains of the external world to reveal the natural sources within.
             These paintings are ebullient vistas, painted directly, without artifice. The skies are suffused with rich amber light. Some of the
            canvases are of proportions that suggest the proscenium arches of the stage, while others expand into broad horizontal panoramas.
            One such panorama, entitled, Looking Thru the Window of Time appears to have been painted with earth, air, fire and water.
            Translucent curtains are woven with loosely vertical strokes of light; slightly parted, they reveal the sky and beyond.
            The imagery one sees is elemental brushstrokes; the sensations are of sheer calm.

            A recent visit to Amy’s studio offered me an opportunity to see how she worked her way across a series of canvases at various stages
            of completion. She works back and forth among three or more pieces at once. Her images develop as she travels between each
           canvas.

           For some time now, she has involved herself in meditative practices that parallel her art making. Just as her chanting draws her
           more deeply into a meditative state, her repetitive mark making draws her more deeply into sync with the evolving work.
           Amy Ernst’s works transports us into a state of contemplation and meditation.

         LARRY LIST is an artist, curator and writer. He has curated exhibitions about early color copier and digital art, collage, and the
   intersections of music, visuall art, and language. He is currently Guest Curator at the Noguchi Museum in New York where he is
organizing an exhibition and book about chess, Surrealism and World War II, The Imagery of Chess Revisited.

        Born in Ottawa in 1947, North Vancouver artist and musician, Gregg Simpson, has been active in visual art, music and multi-media
        since the mid-1960s. He was instrumental in the early developments in Vancouver’s 1960s “golden age” of multi-media, such as
        the Sound Gallery and Intermedia. As a professional drummer and percussionist, he has performed for over forty years
        with some of the major names in jazz.

        Simpson's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the U.S., France, England, Italy, Austria, Switzerland,
        Spain, Portugal, Malaysia, and South America and is included in over 100 private and public collections in, Europe, Asia and
        North America. His work has been written about and studied in several art journals, history books and academic studies at several
        major institutions including: the Sorbonne in Paris, the Université Rabelais de Tours, France and the Accademia Tiberina in Rome
        in a recent presentation by Professor Antonio Malmo.

        In Paris, his work has been exhibited and published by two renowned art historians who were both colleagues of the Surrealist
        Group’s founder, André Breton. The first, José Pierre, included the artist in a major research paper for the University Rabelais
        de Tours and his landmark book, L’Univers Surréaliste, (Editions Somogy,1983) and in 1999, Sarane Alexandrian put Simpson’s
         work in his periodical, Supériore Inconnu, which was started with Breton in 1947.

        Simpson’s work has evolved from the collages and Pop-influenced paintings of the 1960s, through the neo-Surrealism of the
        1970s to an organic abstraction in the last twenty years. The west coast rainforest where he grew up and lives today is always an
        underlying factor in Simpson’s work, alternating with formalist tendencies derived from European art, especially surrealism and
        abstraction. Since 1994, Simpson has spent much time traveling and exhibiting in France and Italy. In 2001, he exhibited a
        retrospective of drawings from 1978-1999 in Seillans, France, the last home of one of his heroes, Max Ernst. In May 2000,

        Simpson exhibited at the Fortezza di Montalcino, a 14^th Century castle in Tuscany, the subject of a BRAVO TV documentary
        entitled A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson in 2003.

       Artist Statement

        My work is on the border between abstraction and surrealism, formal design and automatism. I reject all notions of the end of painting
        and continue to use mark making as my basic tool, as a technique to liberbate the mind and make continue the language of
        visual poetry.

        I begin a work very spontaneously, often with the canvas, or paper, lying on the ground and soaked with water to make the colours
        flow. Then I proceed through a series of re-drawing, shape making, and building layers, using the inner eye to determine a final
         result, which may, or may not, correspond to something in nature

        This may evolve into a lyrical, atmospheric work, or one where formal structures of design suggest the figure, the landscape, or
        even still life, but re-interpreted into a purely imaginative realm, a personal, yet universal, world of forms whose meaning changes
        with each viewer."

Amy Ernst and Gregg Simpson.